Lesbian rape man jailed

A businessman who raped a lesbian in the street after boasting ‘I am going to show you what a real man is’ has been jailed for just over eight years.

Duncan Empson, 32, was a student when he carried out the attack on the 50-year-old six years ago in Central London with an unidentified accomplice.

He hid the dark secret and went on to become a model family man living with his partner and her children in West Reading.

But police took his DNA after he was given a caution for battery after throwing a packet of biscuits at a shopkeeper during a heated row.

The sample was then linked to one of the men who attacked the woman on August 15, 2000, and on Monday he pleaded guilty to rape and indecent assault at Snaresbrook Crown Court.

Judge Patrick O’Mahony said the fact that Empson and his friend knew the victim’s sexuality “added to the cruelty” and branded them “bullies” and “sex predators”.

He said: “You have pleaded guilty to an appalling rape where two fit young men set on a defenceless woman with appalling brutality and subjected her to the most degrading, violent and damaging, both physically and psychologically, attack.”

The court heard Empson and his friend spotted the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, chatting with her girlfriend in a Soho bar.

She left to look for a cashpoint and was followed into Rathbone Place.

Empson then grabbed her by the hair and said: “I know you are a lesbian and I am going to show you what a real man is.”

Prosecutor Margia Mostafa told the court: “She felt scared and threatened and she tried to go. She realised his manner had changed from friendly to very threatening.”

Empson then forced the 50-year-old into oral sex and then raped her, taunting her as a ‘****ing lesbian’, before the second man took his turn.

The two men fled and the terrified victim was found by a policeman with cuts and bruises over her body.

By October 2005, Empson had graduated from the University of Westminster and become a recruitment consultant before setting up a computer business.

Defence barrister Wayne Cleaver said: “He has been living with his partner and her children in the Reading area and taken on a whole new and responsible life and he had become a model family man.

“Developing that business, acting as a father to her partner’s children and effectively her husband, in all but name, the man who committed this offence is a very different man in many ways to the man who is before the court today.”

Empson, of Albany Road, Reading, who has a previous conviction for theft and possessing a class B drug, was jailed for eight years and three months.